2019-10-26 - Landers and Blasters
---------------------------------
On something of a whim, I downloaded MAME today, for the first time
ever. To be strictly accurate, I downloaded OpenEmu, which has MAME
in it, but I think that's kinda pedantry.
Faced, as a result, with the riches of practically every game ever
made for every historic games system, I ended up playing...
Zaxxon & Lunar Lander. The games I played as a kid.
To be fair though, there's a little bit of a history there as to
*why* I ended up playing those games as a kid and as a teen, and it
all comes down to economics.
Lunar Lander, for instance, came out in 1979, and I was ten, but
the country I grew up in had a complete economic collapse in 1980,
and they replaced the currency entirely with a new one, at a
rate of 10:1. This meant that the spanking new machine in
the now-bankrupt arcade wanted coins that were no longer even
available. So the machine found its way to our clubhouse, along
with a huge pile of old coins.
As a consequence, I played the shit out of that game. Unlike kids
in other less fortunate (and non-bankrupt) countries, I could just
keep feeding in coins without consequence, meaning i could play the
game for *hours*.
Five years later, the whole thing repeated anew after the next
economic collapse, except this time the new currency replaced the
old at a rate of 1000:1! The new arcade went just as bust as the
old one, and we got a whole feast of new machines - Dig Dug, Galaga
and Zaxxon - and another giant bucket full of now completely
worthless coins.
Zaxxon was like nothing I'd ever seen before, a 3D isometric
scrolling plane-bomber arcade machine that stole my mind. Being a
bit older, and having more interesting things to do, I never did
get into it in the same way as I did Lunar Lander, but I still
played the shit out of it. I remember being on holiday with my
family a year later and leaving the Zaxxon machine decorated with
my name on every one of the HiScore slots.
So here I am, many, many years later, and all I want to do is play
these old games again.
I guess there's some sort of synchronicity here, I played those
games as the world I knew essentially burned itself out around me.
They're a sort of refuge, a "safe space" that I know and love(d).
With everthing that's going on today, the rise of fascism,
populism, the endless cycle of hatred spewing from some dead-eyed
american billionaires advertising agency, I think we all need to
find this sort of safe space.
You won't find that space on the web, all you'll find is a guy who
wants to sell you this bridge, or, more likely, sell you *to* the
bridge. So I try to find it in these games, and here in the
gopherlands.
I would like to try more games from the thousands available,
though. To give a quick summary I am:
- 50 years old
- with kids (4)
- who didn't really play games in the 90s, 00s
- except civ and tomb raider
I would love to play the *essential* games from that era, I just
don't know where to start. If you have ideas for the paths I should
follow, please, let me know, either by a post or by email. I want
to be all that I can be, and not just repeating the mistakes of my
youth.
